Larry Ellison’s BMW Boat was displayed outside the keynote hall. It looked to be over 100 feet and people were impressed with it.

In the morning I was involved in IOUG activities. Breakfast was with the Fusion and Product Enhancement councils of the IOUC. Then was our IOUG BOD meeting where we discussed our strategic direction as well as short-term benefits and values that we provide today. We also reviewed our finances, trends in the industry, changes within Oracle (such as Siebel), and what IOUG should do to meet the changing needs of the Oracle community and what is relevant to our current members and potential members.

Several of our BOD attended the IOUC luncheon. It was nice to meet user groups from around the world, and great that Oracle brought us all together. I met with many people from the APOUG (Asia-Pacific), most from Australia. I also met with many of my friends from the ILOUG (Israel) and the Mexico user group. There were about 150 people there so I imagine many other countries were represented. Jeb Dasteel gave a nice welcome address, and I was pleased to hear him promote the upcoming Collaborate 06 conference April 23-27 in Nashville.

I went to the IOUG booth for a while. All the user group booths (IOUG, OAUG, ODTUG, Quest) were busy with attendees. The user group pavilion was in Moscone West where many presentations were happening in the 3-story building. There was also registration on the first floor, so you can imagine traffic was strong. I enjoyed talking to existing IOUG members, potential members, regional user group leaders, SIG leaders, and everyone else. It was exciting to see the very positive response to the changes we’ve made in the past several months – from our rebranding to our co-located Collaborate 06 event to the reinvigorating of the SIGs (and almost double participation in SIGs), strong additional benefits to our RUGs, and the new member directory. I also received lots of good feedback on ideas of what IOUG is NOT doing but should (or should be doing better). Many of the ideas were very good and we hope to implement them soon. That is the best way for IOUG to stay with the times – listen to the members and affiliates for ideas and concerns and then act on the relevant feedback.

Next I headed over to the exhibit hall for the first time. It was fairly large, and this year the Oracle campgrounds were split up into different functional areas and around the 4 corners of the large hall (in the past the Oracle campgrounds were all together). I stopped by several areas: Enterprise Manager, Security, Application Server management, Deployment manager, clustering, application development, ASM (Automatic Storage Management), high availability, Oracle Lite 10g.

For Oracle Lite 10g, I found out what is new since 9i. Better device management – you can remotely delete databases on the handhelds. The scalability is better – one customer has 100,000 users in a push-only model. Also they have a mobile database workbench, which is a java-based GUI tool to define schemas and test the application before deployment.

I ran into Andy Mendelsohn in the Oracle campgrounds. First, to have someone like Andy (SVP of the Database Group and 20-year Oracle employee) hang around and open to meet attendees in a low-key fashion is pretty amazing. Andy has been the technical leader for the core Oracle database through some of its best times (I believe since version 7) and still leads technology for the database. I asked Andy what is coming soon from his group. First is what they call “Project Raptor”. It will be Oracle’s “TOAD” For about 20 years, SQL*Plus has had a command-line interface. Project Raptor is a rich GUI PL/SQL and SQL editor, which Oracle is showing this week. Andy also mentioned that they are introducing .NET development capabilities with SQL and PL/SQL integration.

After Andy I had a few press interviews and the IOUG BOD dinner, which was a nice way to relax and catch up in the middle of a busy week.

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